


Murphy's Cut

by the_most_beautiful_broom



Series: 12 Days of Ficmas 2018 [8]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Bank Robbery, F/M, Meet-Cute, is it really a memori meet cute if there isn't weapons and lying involved?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-10
Updated: 2018-12-10
Packaged: 2019-09-15 12:51:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16933572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_most_beautiful_broom/pseuds/the_most_beautiful_broom
Summary: for the prompt: “you’re robbing the bank on Christmas eve and I’m a hostage but you’re actually really nice”





	Murphy's Cut

**** Murphy had definitely tasted better things than the marble floor of the Arkadia Credit Union, but the man in the mask yelled that everyone had better get on the floor, and his partner had fired an automatic weapon into the plaster of the ceiling, so he hit the ground hard. 

Then again, Murphy had definitely tasted worse. 

It was over in about fifteen minutes, and it was a job pretty well done. The robbers had slid a teller a note requiring that they turn off the security cameras so no alarms would be raised when they were shot out. Once the cameras were off, one of them had pulled the gun out of a duffel bag and all the other customers were on the floor. If they were quiet and still, no one would get hurt. 

From a past life, Murphy knew they meant that. Someone was whimpering to his left while the teller emptied the safe into a duffel bag and the sound was grating. 

“Shut up,” he hissed against the marble, and the middle aged woman whimpered. 

“They’re going to kill us all,” she stammered, and Murphy wanted to roll his eyes. 

“They’d have done that already if they’d wanted to,” he shot back. “Since you’re breathing; they don’t want that. But what we don’t need it for you to make them nervous with your wailing.”

The woman gasped, but a combat boot saved either of them from a response, when it stepped between their line of vision. 

“I think,” a voice said, clear and low and bouncing beautifully off the barrel of the rifle casually held in her arms as she stared down at them, “my partner asked you to be quiet.”

“Yeah I was working on that for you,” Murphy said, and maybe it was too quickly, but the last thing he needed on his conscience was for Mrs Soccer Mom to go into actual hysterics and wind up shot. 

“That’s awfully considerate of you,” the woman with the gun said, and she poked Murphy with it, like she was curious. 

“Thanks,” he said, refusing to wince when he felt the cold metal through his sweater. And because he was already in for the penny, he went out for the pound, “I’ll take my cut after you clear the area.”

She snorted. 

Which wasn’t necessarily surprising; Murphy thought he was a barrel of laughs. But not too many other people did. And since she hadn’t shot him with the gun, or broken a rib or two with it, he took his chances, turned his head up towards her voice. 

She had a mask on, of course she did, but even through it...even through it, her eyes took his breath away. Dark brown, deep, with amber in the center like fire, and they narrowed ever-so-slightly when she realized he was looking. Then she tilted her head, blinked slowly like she was breaking the connection herself. Her eyes left his and roamed his face, unhurried, unpressed, which was easy to do when you held a gun and a room full of people in your hands. 

“Ah, pretty boy,” she said, voice thoughtful. “You’d better be careful. People call ‘aiding and abetting’ pretty easily these days.” 

“I’ll take my chances,” he said, and he didn’t mean to, but he absolutely meant it. He wasn’t sure what those chances were, or what the reward, but he absolutely would. 

She made a soft humming sound, and then turned back to the counter. “Hurry up, would you?” she called.

“What, getting nervous?” Murphy asked. Maybe it was because he wanted to keep her attention on him just to keep everyone else out of it, maybe he was curious how the rest of the heist was planned out, or maybe he missed the weight of her eyes on him. 

“That’s my line,” she said, humor on her voice, before she poked him with the gun again and Murphy grunted as his face turned back to the marble. 

“Okay, that’s everything, Em,” called the man with the teller and the woman swore. 

“Do you want to tell them my address? Maybe my social security number too?” she asked, voice biting. 

“I-I wasn’t trying to—”

“Well you weren’t trying not to,” she said sharply, and then she turned back from the counter, dismissing her partner. 

Murphy frowned at the pavement; angry people made irrational decisions. And angry people and irrational decisions were bad enough, but they had an automatic rifle in the picture. Whoever the partner was, he wasn’t this woman’s equal, and something about her made him think she’d only do jobs with her equals. Which meant she owed her partner a favor or…

“So,” Murphy said it casually, like he was just making conversation. “How long have you and your brother been doing jobs?”

She turned to him so quickly that he didn’t have time to react; her boot hit his jaw, hard. Murphy was glad he’d lifted his head a bit, because her kick had him seeing stars, but it didn’t knock him into the marble. 

There was a siren. 

A police siren, specifically, and all the other customers seemed relieved, but Murphy couldn’t share the feeling.  He didn’t like the odds of the robbers letting them go, now that the police were involved. Being blocked in, feeling trapped...he knew that feeling, and he knew how he acted on that.

But apparently, the woman with the gun didn’t know the meaning of panic. She flipped her wrist over to check the time on her watch, and her eyebrows raised slightly. 

“Three minutes early,” she muttered, before raising her voice. “Okay, listen up, everyone. Like we said, we don’t want everyone to get hurt. That’s not a great way to start this Christmas. So. We let you out, one at a time. You go straight to the police outside, they’ll be waiting for you; one at a time, nice and slow. What you don’t do, is tell them how many of us there are. Say it happened too fast, say you only looked at the ground; for most of you, that’s the truth anyways. If you do decide you want to tell the police, I will shoot whoever was going to be sent out next. Got it?”

There was terrified nodding all around. 

Em nodded shortly, and indicated where they should line up; everyone scrambled into order (not Muprhy; he never scrambled. Besides, he was still recovering to the kick to his jaw). 

“Please,” Em said, her voice almost bored, “No screaming.”

Then she picked up a paperweight from a banker’s desk and hurled it towards the window at the front of the bank. It shattered beautifully. Once broken, they could hear the speakers from the police car: come out with your hands up, leave your weapons, you’re surrounded. 

Em inched to the front of the store, so she could yell out the window. 

“I’m sending out hostages,” she called. “They’re unarmed and unharmed, and they’re coming every sixty seconds.”

That was met with an appropriate bustle of activity from the police. 

The first hostage Em sent out was an older woman, shaking so hard she could barely walk. Em held the door for her, listening to hear when the police called that they had her covered. The second was a middle-aged man, wall-street type. She eyed him and he eyed her as he walked to the door, but she let him pass. 

“Em—” came the nervous call from the partner by the desk. 

“Yeah I know,” she said curtly, striding back to the line up. “Is he talking?”

“He’s not to the police yet,” her brother said, looking through another window. “But he looked like—”

“He did, didn’t he?” Em mused, thinking. Her eyes landed on Murphy, and this time he didn’t like it. “Sorry about this,” she said cheerfully. 

And she shot him. 

It was a shoulder shot, so it wasn't anything personal. Clean, too, and pretty carefully placed but it took everything in Murphy not to cry out. A couple people screamed, and when Em looked to the window, her brother nodded.

“He looks scared,” he explained of the scene outside, “he’s not talking.”

“Good.”

She walked quickly to the front of the line, bent over to be at eye level with the next person. It was the woman who’d been crying earlier. 

“What’s your name?” Em asked. 

“C-Cathy.”

“Hi Cathy,” Em said, her mask stretching to hide a smile. “I just broke my promise to save your life. Are you going to go out there and make me chose again?”

The woman shook her head violently and Em nodded. 

“Alright. After you go out, do you know how many hostages I have?”

“I-I don’t know—”

“Five,” Em said, sharp. “Say it.”

“Five,” Cathy repeated.

“Good. There are five of you left; let the police know that. I told you I didn’t want to hurt any of you, and I still don’t. The police will get their five hostages, and none of you will get hurt. Well, any more. Tell them to get a stretcher for this guy. So how many?”

“Five,” Cathy whispered. 

“Good girl. Go on, then.”

Cathy sprinted for the door.

From the ripping pain in his shoulder, Murphy blinked around the room. It hurt something horrible, but he could walk.  “I don’t need a stretcher.”

“You will by the time you get out there,” Em said, distracted. “You’re going to lose a lot of blood; sit down.”

He sat on the edge of the counter. 

They sent out another business man, then a man with wire glasses and a calico shirt buttoned all the way up to his beard. 

And then, Murphy realized, that was it. 

Damn, she was good. 

There had only been three more hostages, but everyone had been too terrified to double check that. She and her brother were going to walk out as hostages, in the clear, and run once the police rushed the building. 

“Alright, you’re next. Give me your shirt.”

She wasn’t talking to him though, but to her brother. She glanced carefully at Murphy, then shrugged, turning back to her brother and yanking the mask off his face. In the bag with the money from the safe, she dropped the gun and masks. Her brother took off his flannel and Em wadded it up, then pulled a pair of glasses out of the same duffel, setting them on her brothers head and smoothing the wrinkles of his undershirt. 

“Your name is Landon and you just wanted to deposit a check before lacrosse practice.There’s just two people left behind you, the poor dude that the crazy girl shot, and his girlfriend.”

“I’m Landon and I missed lacrosse practice,” her brother recited, and Em swatted him out the door. Shoulders hunched, he made his way across the front steps to the police. None of the hostages batted an eye. 

Em looked at Murphy again, then back to her bag; she pulled off her mask, then her black sweater, tossing them into the bag. Murphy wondered if he should look away, but he didn’t want to and she didn’t mind; then she was pulling on a white tshirt. 

When she turned back to Murphy, he wasn’t sure if he was lightheaded from the blood loss, the craziness of this last half hour, of just the intensity of this woman. 

“Take this,” she tossed her brother’s flannel at Murphy, and he caught it without thinking. “Put some pressure on your shoulder. Sorry about that, by the way, but I had to prove a point.”

“No worries,” Murphy mumbled, before he realized that he’d just said  _ no worries _ to a freaking gunshot wound.  

Em walked over to a potted palm in the corner, leaned against the heavy base to move it. It slid across the marble and there was a hole; she dropped the duffel down it. She ran a hand through her hair, then slid the palm back in place, crossing the room to Murphy. 

She ducked under his arm that wasn’t bleeding, pulling him to his feet. He grunted, and then a small hand was on top of his on the flannel, pushing it over the wound. 

“What’s your name?” she asked as she walked them to the door. 

Murphy wanted to be stronger than this, but he wasn’t, and leaned heavily on her. “Murphy.”

“No,” she shook her head, just behind the door. “What am I supposed to call you?”

And he knew, in the back of his mind, that she was asking what his hypothetical girlfriend would call him, if she was going to get out of this alive. But, something fluttered in his chest when he realized he was about to tell her anyways. 

“Uh, John,” he said, looking down at the ground, before back at the amber of her eyes.

The corners of her mouth turned up just a bit, and she paused just before the door. “Nice to meet you, John,” she said politely, then her smile grew as she turned to look at him. “Ready to earn your cut?”

And then she kicked the door open. 


End file.
